Read Online The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) by Neve Maslakovic - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Neve Maslakovic
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acquaintances of the family, cancelled each other out, with one person swearing that he’d helped Olof carve the runes and the other that he had seen the stone unearthed with his own eyes. From that point onward, the opinions varied, with professional linguists and historians firmly on the no side and amateur enthusiasts and the occasional geologist leaning toward yes .
I didn’t like assuming anyone was a liar or that Dr. Payne was right, but the most likely scenario was that Olof Ohman had carved the stone in his barn soon after settling on his new farm, then buried it under the tree only to “discover” it several years later, giving the roots plenty of time to curl down over the runestone. It didn’t embroil the two Ohman sons or Magnus in the hoax…unless the boys had been in on the whole thing, eager to participate in the prank, a rare bit of fun in the hard-scrabble immigrant life.
I left the library thinking that the matter should have a simple answer. Either the stone was real, or it wasn’t. Though I highly doubted he had bothered to do much research, I was beginning to see why Quinn had thought a STEWie run might be just the thing.
7
The following morning, I awoke to the chirping of birds and the thought that I only had a day left. It was high time for me to see the runestone in person. Not on a STEWie run, but in the museum over in Alexandria.
The thing was, I wanted someone else’s opinion on whether the whole thing was a hoax…and who better than an expert in crime?
I called up Nate to see if he felt like taking a Sunday drive. It was only after I hung up the phone that I realized what I had done. One, he must have thought I had just invited him on an unofficial date. Two, had I? I could just as easily have called our retired chief of security, Dan Anderson, and asked him to come. Dan didn’t get out much these days and would have probably enjoyed the company. Three, this was hardly the time to be thinking about romance, with my almost-ex husband back in town with blackmail on his mind…so did that mean I should dress down in a ratty T-shirt and sweatpants to prevent any misunderstandings about the nature of my invitation? Or four, did it mean I should dress up, because that would make Nate less suspicious that something else was going on?
I rather thought Nate wouldn’t notice either way and decided to stay with my jeans and button-down shirt.
He showed up an hour later in slacks and a windbreaker, his hair wet and freshly combed. Wanda burst out of the Jeep and ran inside to greet Celer, who submitted to the other dog’s sniffing without bothering to get up. Nate suggested we take his Jeep and not my aged Honda, and we left, leaving Abigail and Sabina to decide whether they wanted to take the dogs on a walk to the nearby apple orchard or drive them. It was certainly a nice day for it—the apple-picking season was in full swing, and Friday’s humid rain had been replaced by sunshine and a crispness in the air that hinted that winter was not far off. I promised the girls that we’d try making an apple pie in the afternoon.
Nate drove the half hour to Alexandria on Highway 94 through gently hilly farmland while I looked out the window, watching the scattered farmhouses with their red barns and dome-topped corn silos, the pointy Lutheran church spires peeking above treetops, and the small lakes surrounded by tall grasses, wondering what the area had been like when Olof Ohman had arrived from Scandinavia in search of a better life. Here and there cows and buffalo grazed placidly, not bothering to look up at the highway traffic zipping by. Fields laden with yellow corn rippled gently in the wind. The billboards disfiguring the scenery on both sides of the highway would not have been there in Olof Ohman’s time, of course, nor would the road itself, for that matter. A wagon and horses would have been used for transport. And in the fourteenth century, the date given on the runestone, travelers
I didn’t like assuming anyone was a liar or that Dr. Payne was right, but the most likely scenario was that Olof Ohman had carved the stone in his barn soon after settling on his new farm, then buried it under the tree only to “discover” it several years later, giving the roots plenty of time to curl down over the runestone. It didn’t embroil the two Ohman sons or Magnus in the hoax…unless the boys had been in on the whole thing, eager to participate in the prank, a rare bit of fun in the hard-scrabble immigrant life.
I left the library thinking that the matter should have a simple answer. Either the stone was real, or it wasn’t. Though I highly doubted he had bothered to do much research, I was beginning to see why Quinn had thought a STEWie run might be just the thing.
7
The following morning, I awoke to the chirping of birds and the thought that I only had a day left. It was high time for me to see the runestone in person. Not on a STEWie run, but in the museum over in Alexandria.
The thing was, I wanted someone else’s opinion on whether the whole thing was a hoax…and who better than an expert in crime?
I called up Nate to see if he felt like taking a Sunday drive. It was only after I hung up the phone that I realized what I had done. One, he must have thought I had just invited him on an unofficial date. Two, had I? I could just as easily have called our retired chief of security, Dan Anderson, and asked him to come. Dan didn’t get out much these days and would have probably enjoyed the company. Three, this was hardly the time to be thinking about romance, with my almost-ex husband back in town with blackmail on his mind…so did that mean I should dress down in a ratty T-shirt and sweatpants to prevent any misunderstandings about the nature of my invitation? Or four, did it mean I should dress up, because that would make Nate less suspicious that something else was going on?
I rather thought Nate wouldn’t notice either way and decided to stay with my jeans and button-down shirt.
He showed up an hour later in slacks and a windbreaker, his hair wet and freshly combed. Wanda burst out of the Jeep and ran inside to greet Celer, who submitted to the other dog’s sniffing without bothering to get up. Nate suggested we take his Jeep and not my aged Honda, and we left, leaving Abigail and Sabina to decide whether they wanted to take the dogs on a walk to the nearby apple orchard or drive them. It was certainly a nice day for it—the apple-picking season was in full swing, and Friday’s humid rain had been replaced by sunshine and a crispness in the air that hinted that winter was not far off. I promised the girls that we’d try making an apple pie in the afternoon.
Nate drove the half hour to Alexandria on Highway 94 through gently hilly farmland while I looked out the window, watching the scattered farmhouses with their red barns and dome-topped corn silos, the pointy Lutheran church spires peeking above treetops, and the small lakes surrounded by tall grasses, wondering what the area had been like when Olof Ohman had arrived from Scandinavia in search of a better life. Here and there cows and buffalo grazed placidly, not bothering to look up at the highway traffic zipping by. Fields laden with yellow corn rippled gently in the wind. The billboards disfiguring the scenery on both sides of the highway would not have been there in Olof Ohman’s time, of course, nor would the road itself, for that matter. A wagon and horses would have been used for transport. And in the fourteenth century, the date given on the runestone, travelers
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